Historical archaeology might be defined as the study of the modern world's development through investigations of material and archival remains of past societies. Because of its focus on the post-Columbian era, Charles Orser drew attention to the “haunts” of historical archaeology, including colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, and modernity. This course focuses primarily on the field in North America, including its history and development. Historical archaeology now provides crucial perspectives on the silenced, overlooked, and obscured histories and experiences of marginalized peoples. Anthropological approaches enable historical archaeologists to link past events and processes to our current moment and to better understand the enduring legacies of sociopolitical formations and institutions that perpetuate various forms of inequality.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-ARCH, ARCH-RELATE

Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness.

• Days/Times: T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room: Krieger 170
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, CES-ELECT

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

• Days/Times: F 12:00PM - 1:15PM, W 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 111
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 3/18
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

• Days/Times: F 12:00PM - 1:15PM, W 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 111
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/18
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness.

• Days/Times: T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room: Krieger 170
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, CES-ELECT

How does language get entangled in our cultural and social understandings? How do we learn to locate a person correctly in a particular social class or ethnicity? This course aims to show the ways in which language is at the center of our daily interactions and our institutions. We will learn conceptual tools to examine the ways in which writers and leaders attempt to persuade their publics in important matters such as climate change, party politics, and religious differences.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): CES-ELECT

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

• Days/Times: F 12:00PM - 1:15PM, W 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 111
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/18
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

What do we call "home"? It seems that when we call (something) home, we are all reaching out toward different places or ideas. Is it a haven? a source of identity? the object of longing? a domain of hierarchy and oppression? This course offers a critical examination of the apparently self-evident notion of home. Through the lens of disciplines like anthropology, literature, or socio-legal studies, we will explore home in diverse cultural settings, as realms of care, intimacy, and belonging yet also as sites of subjection, discrimination, and gender/racial inequality. Our analysis will extend to a variety of media such as films, podcasts, music, museum exhibits, and personal experiences.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): CES-ELECT

An emerging body of literature argues that cities in the Global South work differently than Eurocentric theories of the city and urbanization suggest. This course will focus on such issues as the important role of cities in the nation’s economy, politics, and culture and interrogates the relationship between the city and its “outside.” This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that African cities, as an urban form, concept, and geography have been generative in anthropology, as well as in history, sociology, and urban studies. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of an African city outside of this limiting history? In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of African cities as an urban form, and lived experience, re-sorting its geographies and theorizations. We will explore issues of urban planning, (de)industrialization, urban race/ethnic relations, movement, and other issues important to the urban experience.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL, CES-CC

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

• Days/Times: F 12:00PM - 1:15PM, W 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 111
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/18
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness.

• Days/Times: T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room: Krieger 170
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, CES-ELECT

Childbirth is an event that is highly cultural, and is accompanied by gestures and beliefs that say a lot about the society in which they can be observed. This class will be based on Ancient Egyptian texts (translated), images and objects related to beliefs and practices surrounding pregnancy, birth-giving and the first moments of human life. We will discover the Egyptian views on procreation, the objects, the spells and the formulas used to protect pregnancy and childbirth – one of the most dangerous moments in a woman’s life –, the divine entities invoked, the reactions caused by non-ordinary births (for example, twins), and the purification rites that punctuate the post-partum period. Finally, we will see that the first biological birth is a model on which many beliefs about life after death are based. Several guest researchers will present birth and childbirth in other ancient societies in order to broaden the discussion and establish comparisons.

• Days/Times: WF 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Arnette, Marie-Lys
• Room: Gilman 130G
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/20
• PosTag(s): ARCH-ARCH, ARCH-RELATE

Climate change is a vast topic, pervading our present and casting a pall of uncertainty over the possibility of a livable future. But, stepping back from a sense of climate change as a self-evident set of biophysical realities, how does climate, which unlike weather is only knowable in highly mediated ways, become sensible? What problems does it pose for thought? And how might we become more adequately responsive to its challenges? Departing from these questions, we will explore a variety of angles through which anthropologists have approached climate change, in dialogue with materials from other disciplines and media, to consider what anthropology may contribute to our understanding of life with climate change.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Maddox, Perry
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/18
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR, MSCH-HUM, ARCH-RELATE, CES-LSO

Bangladesh, the small, populous Muslim majority country in South Asia, steadily moving into middle income status, offers an off-centered but important vantage point upon the political culture of the region. We will read several new historical and ethnographic works, combined with film, fiction and art, to get a feel for this perspective, even as we interrogate what Bangladesh presumes about itself.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/13
• PosTag(s): INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL

This course examines, through an anthropological lens, the promise and limitations of local, grassroots social and economic forms of organization that propose alternatives to the market economy. Using the framework of "diverse economies," we will look closely at worker-run businesses; consumer cooperatives; community land-trusts; local currencies; self-help associations; fair trade organizations and knowledge networks; to inquire how these social economies propose autonomous forms of sharing resources, property, and labor. The course will involve research on some of Baltimore's burgeoning co-op endeavors.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): CES-FT

Why are so many social media apps free? How did surveillance take place before the internet? What does the TSA see when you go through a body scanner at the airport? This seminar will help students answer these questions by introducing them to the historical development of surveillance cultures as well as their contemporary iterations. We will explore how surveillance shapes communities, politics, subjectivities, and more broadly, our everyday lives. Through readings of key academic texts, documentaries, literary texts, ethnographies, and current events, we will try to gain a full picture, through discussion, of how surveillance has evolved and come to permeate society. By understanding surveillance as a technology of power, we will analyze how this power is applied differentially across different marginalized groups and in different regional contexts. In addition, we will examine the political possibilities that emerge from activist and otherwise everyday tactics to counteract surveillance.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Islam, Heba Zainab
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/18
• PosTag(s): CES-TI

What is violence? Ubiquitous as a concept, it remains difficult to define both its essences and boundaries. How do we distinguish between criminality, organized, and unorganized violence? Is violence the antithesis of society, or a central component of it? In this course, we will disscuss the concept of violence, the challenges of writing about it and explore the potentials that emerge from bodies subjugated to racialized/gendered forms of violence. We will examine a number of different ethnographic spaces, including genocide in Rwanda, conflict resolution among the Nuer, the concept of criminality in Indonesia, largescale massacres in Thailand, and police violence in the United States

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/9
• PosTag(s): INST-CP, MSCH-HUM, CES-GI, CES-RI, CES-LSO

This course explores the craft of ethnography as a mode of research and writing fundamental to anthropology. Through the close reading of several ethnographic works, we will consider the intertwining of description, local concepts, and analysis. We will undertake several observation and writing exercises to learn how to write in an ethnographic mode and translate field research into lively texts.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

This class is an occasion for speculative anthropology, a chance to reimagine this place (an American city on the Jones Falls river) in a future beyond the bustle of our fossil-fueled present. What culture might people of that distant time produce, and how might they make creative use of the many things we leave behind? In this class, we will work together as anthropologists and artists of another time, crafting an inventive and collaborative story about a culture to come, and the material artifacts of a very different collective life. The class will be co-taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian and visual artist Jordan Tierney. We will nurture our imaginations through experiential practices of observing nature, collecting materials, and assembling artifacts. What we build will serve as the core of a spring 2025 local museum exhibition we will plan together.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandian, Anand; Tierney, Maureen
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/18
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE, ENVS-MAJOR

Students are invited to attend, for credit, the departmental research colloquium in anthropology. The colloquium meets most (but not all) Tuesday afternoons during the semester. Students are expected to attend and listen, encouraged to ask questions when they wish, and to write one brief reflection on contemporary trends in the field, based on what they have observed during these sessions. Prerequisite: Students must have completed one Anthropology course previously This course does not apply to Anthropology major or minors towards their minimum department requirement. It counts towards your total credit requirement to degree..

• Days/Times: T 4:00PM - 6:00PM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores the intersections and boundaries between magic, science, and religion. Students will examine how these domains of knowledge and practice have been defined, differentiated, and interrelated in various societies. Central questions include: How are the differences between magic, science, and religion consolidated, negotiated, and manifested in everyday life? How do these categories shape worldviews, social structures, and individual experiences? Through case studies, theoretical readings, and hands-on projects, students will gain a nuanced understanding of how humans make meaning and navigate between different ways of knowing and acting in the world.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Kim, Sujung
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

South Asia boasts a rich history of film making of different genres and languages, ranging from commercial to art films. Many have come to be the favorites of the faculty of Hopkins who work on South Asia. In this course each of the faculty teaching this course will introduce a film of their choosing, pairing it with a reading.

• Days/Times: W 5:00PM - 8:00PM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda; Mufti, Aamir
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/25
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course examines ideological and imaginative encounters between Buddhism and modernity. Drawing on detailed case studies from various regions of Buddhist Asia, the course critically examines how Buddhist communities have responded to modernity and continue to navigate the complexities of the modern and contemporary world. Through readings, films, field trips, and creative projects, the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing various ideological, social, and cultural issues that intersect with Buddhist modernism.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Kim, Sujung
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

The word for “medicine” in Malagasy, fanafody, can also mean “charm” or “magic.” This seminar uses that linguistic flexibility as a point of departure to explore practices for bodily healing and protection amid broader processes of social transformation, primarily in 20th- and 21st-century East Africa and the western Indian Ocean. How is the medical magical? How is the magical medical? How have separations between magic and medicine been erected, maintained, or questioned? From the role of faith healers to the region's experience of new "miracle drugs," class materials will integrate anthropology, history, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine various permutations of the magic/medicine duality over time. Topics will include facets of traditional medicine; encounters between indigenous and imported healing systems; medical pluralism; colonial and postcolonial conflicts; the rise of humanitarian global health; epidemic and pandemic politics; ritual and religious processes; and the roles of identity, inequality, and empire in healing and protection practices. Grounded in Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa, this course will also use magic/medicine to consider the region’s transcontinental and transoceanic connections.

• Days/Times: M 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Robbins, Gabrielle Lydia Marie
• Room: Bloomberg 176
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

What does it mean that until relatively recently, the center of queer/trans culture was the underground – a metaphorical space of illegality – and what are the political possibilities of such illegality? This seminar will consider how Black/trans fugitivity and interracial sex, trans identity theft and forgery, black market hormones and silicone injections, sex work, and mood-altering drugs defined same-sex desiring and gender-variant cultures during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far from being a lawless place, we will analyze how life in the underground, including stints in prison, concretely shaped gender and sexual possibilities, subcultural codes of conduct, and practices of community-making.

• Days/Times: Th 2:30PM - 5:00PM
• Instructor: Amin, Kadji
• Room: Krieger 307
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Baltimore is replete with economic experimentation, organizing, and transformation. Learning from/with these experiences and contributing to them is the main aim of this course. It involves a combination of engaged service, collaborative research, reading, and reflection to understand and inform place-based efforts to build equitable urban futures in the city. Sponsored by the JHU Center for Social Concern, the course is co-taught with community organizers to give first-hand exposure to economic conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts. Students will work closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects for social justice and urban regeneration. Schedule is flexible to facilitate visits to on-site work and conversations.

• Days/Times: Th 4:00PM - 6:30PM
• Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR, CES-CC, CES-LE

The knowledge and practices of science and medicine are not as self-evident as they may appear. When we observe, what do we see? What counts as evidence? How does evidence become fact? How do facts circulate and what are their effects? Who is included in and excluded from our common-sense notions of science, medicine, and technology? This course will introduce students to central theoretical concerns in Science and Technology Studies and the Medical Humanities, focusing on enduring problematics that animate scholars. In conjunction with examinations of theoretical bases, students will learn to evaluate the methodological tools used in different fields in the humanities to study the production and circulation of scientific knowledge and the structures of medical care and public health. This problem-centered approach will help students understand and apply key concepts and approaches in critical studies of science, technology, and medicine.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Vado, Karina A
• Room: Ames 320
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/18
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, CES-TI

Can care exist in a space of punishment? Institutions of incarceration are inherently spaces of violence and social control and, in the U.S.’s current context of mass incarceration, racial oppression. Yet prisons, jails, and detention centers are required to provide individuals access to health care. How can we understand this convergence of care for the body and psyche with multiple forms of carceral violence? This course will examine modes of health and health care inside institutions of incarceration as they are situated within broader socio-political contexts that shape society’s over-reliance on incarceration as a means of social and racialized control. Drawing on history, anthropology, sociology, legal theory, critical race studies, and public health, the course will explore the everyday realities inside institutions of incarceration as they relate to suffering and care and how those are connected to policies and processes of subjugation outside the institutions’ walls. Case studies for examining these relationships include pregnancy, COVID-19, addiction, and mental illness behind bars. Students will engage with concepts such as disciplinary power, biopower, carceral and anti-carceral feminism, theories of care, medical abolition, and dual loyalty. While the course will primarily focus on the U.S. context, we will also draw comparisons to non-U.S. settings. Throughout the course we will seek to understand how institutions of incarceration are not, as popularly understood, isolated places “elsewhere,” but implicitly porous with so-called free society—and therefore as exemplars for understanding the connections among health, inequality, and state institutions.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Sufrin, Carolyn
• Room: Krieger 308
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): CES-LSO, CES-RI, MSCH-HUM

On 13 October 2022, a middle-aged upper-middle class Chinese man staged a public political protest on an elevated road in Beijing. Peng Lifa, or “Bridge Man,” as he has become known in allusion to Tank Man from the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, demanded elections and reforms. How have urban Chinese been able to be so content or even happy despite their lack of political freedom? The class readings will introduce you to different kinds of activists who have confronted the authoritarian state since the late 1990s, among them human rights lawyers, reporters, environmental activists, feminists, religious activists, and labor activists. We will ask whether freedom, an obviously Western notion, is useful as an analytical category to think about China. Does freedom translate across the West/non-West divide?

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Henning, Stefan
• Room: Mergenthaler 266
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): INST-CP, CES-LSO

The American continent and its islands are home to a diverse and delicate ecosystem, and for millennia, Indigenous communities have tended to and shaped these rich landscapes. This seminar journeys across the Americas to understand how Indigenous makers cultivated materials from these ecologies and transformed them into impressive arrays of art and architecture. Each week, students will explore a different medium—bark, shell, rubber, feathers, reed, stone, clay, etc.—that makers shaped into visual and spatial forms. Although this course focuses on the ancestral and early modern periods, it will also explore continued and shifting practices with these materials among contemporary artists. Readings will include material analyses, art historical and archaeological interpretations, as well as early colonial writings by Indigenous authors. There will also be opportunities for students to engage with materials in class. Course material will cover issues of technical skill and ecological knowledge; ephemerality and (im)permanence; animacy and relationality as it pertains to the relationships formed between makers and their works; and the role of Indigenous materialities in reconfiguring canons and categories that continue to scaffold the field of art history. For their final assignment, students will select a multimedia work from the Indigenous Americas and unpack its materiality in both presentation and essay format.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Meyer, Anthony Joshua
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): HART-RENEM, HART-ANC, HART-MED, ARCH-ARCH, MSCH-HUM

Ever since the Chinese Empire fell in 1911, Chinese have tried to think of themselves as modern and to build a modern Chinese state. Among the Western concepts that Chinese appropriated to define and comprehend themselves were the notions of ethnicity, culture, nationality, and race. We will try to answer the following questions: What was the allure of arcane and elusive Western categories on culture, ethnicity, and race for Chinese scientists in the 20th century, and how did these categories come to underpin the rule of the Chinese state over its enormous population since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949? How have the Chinese state’s policies on nationality and ethnicity shaped the minds of American China scholars as they study ethnicity and nationality in China?

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Henning, Stefan
• Room: Mergenthaler 266
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL, CES-RI

One of the most significant transformations in human history was the “urban revolution” in which cities, writing, and social classes formed for the first time. In this course, we compare five areas where this development occurred: China, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Egypt, and Mesoamerica (Mexico/Guatemala/Honduras/Belize). In each region, we review the physical setting, the archaeological and textual evidence, and the theories advanced to explain the rise (and eventual collapse) of these complex societies.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Schwartz, Glenn M
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 31/40
• PosTag(s): ARCH-ARCH, CES-LC, CES-PD, CES-LE, ARCH-RELATE

Take a moment to reflect on the present and future, and it is difficult to escape a sense of things breaking down in a fundamental way. But cycles of breakdown and repair are an ecological reality. And human communities, especially those marginalized and exploited by prevailing social and political structures, have long pursued repair and reparation as matters of both survival and justice. This course thinks through ideas of repair as means of engaging with contemporary social and ecological impasses in a spirit of restitution. Drawing from environmental anthropology, materialist philosophy, and abolitionist thought, we will work to chart the ethical and strategic promise of repair as a mode of engagement with toxic and unlivable circumstances. We will also work in the manner of a collective studio, each of us pursuing and charting a specific practice of repair.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandian, Anand
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

There are almost 500 million Indigenous people in the world. They speak a variety of languages, produce knowledge in their mother tongues, and have deep connections to their lands and cultures. Indigenous people have been at the helm of a Global Indigeneity Movement that has mobilized both scholarship and activism in search of a better world. Despite their best efforts, the rich indigenous cultural production and their worldviews remain confined to very limited circles. Building on the notion of "indigenous ecologies," which spans a wide range of approaches and fields, this course will interrogate some of the salient questions related to literature, translation, extraction, environmentalism, and social justice from the perspective of Indigenous creators. The students will engage with materials produced by Indigenous thinkers, filmmakers, activists, and academic scholars to gain a deeper understanding of indigeneity across cultures and continents as well as the myriad critical ways in which its proponents approach knowledge production, climate change, and many other pressing questions.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/12
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR, CDS-GI, MSCH-HUM

Famously, Karl Marx had little to say about gender, sexuality, or race. Yet, scholars have developed Marxist theory to account for how a capitalist political economy generates racial divisions, gender inequalities, and queer and trans subcultures. This course will introduce students to feminist, queer, trans, and Black Marxist theory. Key concepts will include: social reproduction, racial capitalism, and sexual hegemony. Students will consider how Marxist theorists envision the place of race, gender, family, and sexuality in a utopian post-capitalist future.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Amin, Kadji
• Room: Bloomberg 276
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/12
• PosTag(s): CES-GI, CES-LC

Anthropology is an endeavor to think with the empirical richness of the world at hand, a field science with both literary and philosophical pretensions. This course grapples with the nature of anthropological inquiry, reading classic works in the discipline as well as contemporary efforts to reimagine its foundations. Required for anthropology majors.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/12
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

This class provides an introduction to the popular musics of the Arab world from the 1920s through the early 2000s. The goals of this course will be twofold: first, we will consider the ways that technology, global and regional politics, class, and gender shaped musical aesthetics. Second, we will interrogate the role that popular music played in shaping understandings of national character and regional boundaries. Through close listening and reading assignments, students will develop listening and analytical skills specific to the music of the Arab world, and learn techniques for analyzing this popular music’s entanglement with its social, historical, and cultural context. What, for example, do the radio and music industries have to do with the rise of Arab Nationalism? What can the development of Lebanese indie-rock since the 1990s tell us about contemporary Lebanese sociopolitics? Through weekly reading and listening assignments, students will work towards a final project that traces the history of one genre of Arab pop music over the course of the 20th century.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Rayes, Nour
• Room: Shriver Hall 028G
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Oral Histories are a means by which history is both generated and preserved. Talking to and recording people in their own voices is immensely valuable, but also brings challenges. This course equips students with the ideas, theoretical framework and methods of making and interpreting oral histories and provides hands-on experience researching, designing and creating an archival record of our time to professional standards. Our project focuses on Baltimore's Confederate monuments. We will interview key stakeholders in debates that led to their removal and in ongoing conversations about what to do with them now.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Staff
• Room: Gilman 75
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Cancer, the ‘emperor of all maladies,’ is a leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer is, seemingly, everywhere: it brings to mind screening programs, pinkwashed fundraisers, promises of a cure, and myriad memoirs and fictions, lending cancer an abundance of meaning in our contemporary world. With developments in genetic testing and early detection, many aspects of contemporary cancer care have transformed—and with them, questions around risk and responsibility. In the clinic, cancer outcomes are increasingly understood in terms of individualized risk. Yet, these developments and ways of understanding cancer are limited to urban centers of the world, largely in the U.S. and Europe, with access to costly medical technologies. Further, experiences and outcomes of cancer care, from surveillance to treatment, refract along lines of race, gender, and geography, and the disease is a frame through which the politics of healthcare can be starkly seen and traced. In this upper-level undergraduate seminar, students are invited to explore cancer care—inequalities, experiences, and poetics—through literary and ethnographic analysis.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Roth, Sarah
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This course begins with reading the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin’s monumental work that was published some 150 years ago. We then build on this foundation to survey biological anthropology as a Darwinian historical science, with an emphasis on human evolution, variation, and biocultural histories. This allows us to understand how Darwin’s theory was misunderstood and misrepresented within social and scientific circles for more than a century. In the early 1950s, Sherwood Washburn called for a “new physical anthropology.” His approach shifted away from static, descriptive typology towards a dynamic, biocultural history of the human species. Recently, the “biocultural” approach is being revitalized to challenge disciplinary practices that consider the body as either a constructed cultural symbol or a natural anatomical specimen. We conclude with scholars’ creative attempts to decolonize knowledge production within ecologies of beings that are historical, relational, and multiple. This course requires the student to have taken at least one Anthropology course previously.

• Days/Times: M 4:00PM - 6:30PM
• Instructor: Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/5
• PosTag(s): ARCH-ARCH, MSCH-HUM

The ancient Egyptians played many games, as we do today. Board games, ball games, games of skill, etc., were not only part of daily life, but also had a role to play in religious practices and beliefs. Although the rules of the games are largely unknown to us, archaeological objects, funerary images, and texts help us to better understand their roles and meanings in ancient Egyptian culture. These various sources also show how games reflect (or contradict) some facets of the organization of the society, and reveal how the ancient Egyptians perceived some aspects of their world - social hierarchy, gender division, representation of death, relationship to chance/fate/divine will, etc. This course will present the evolution of games and play in Ancient Egypt from the 4th millennium BCE, with the first board game discovered in the tomb of a woman, through those deposited in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and up to the Roman period. By replacing the games in their archaeological, historical and cultural contexts, the course is also intended as an original introduction to the civilization of ancient Egypt. The course will consist mainly of lectures given by the professor, with several guest researchers. Examinations will be divided into three parts: two knowledge quizzes during the semester; at the end of the semester, an essay on an Egyptian game of the student's choice.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Arnette, Marie-Lys
• Room: Gilman 130G
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-ARCH

This course will introduce students to the cutting-edge debates on global migration and refugees and give them a first-hand look at the complicated interactions between research, politics, and policy-making. Each week, students will read the work of a featured scholar who will visit the class as a guest lecture, giving students the unique opportunity to directly engage with the scholar. In addition, policy makers, community groups, and activists dealing with migration will visit the class for guest lectures, and students will have the opportunity to learn exactly how, when, and why research is (and is not) applied on the ground. To highlight the global nature of the theme, the course will highlight issues of immigration and emigration, receiving and sending countries, in the global North and South. This course is offered in Washington DC and is available to students accepted to the Spring 2025 Hopkins Semester DC only.

• Days/Times: Th 2:30PM - 5:00PM
• Instructor: Agarwala, Rina
• Room: 555 Penn 448
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 15/20
• PosTag(s): INST-IR, INST-GLOBAL

The Korean War from the dominant U.S. perspective is seen as a “forgotten war”, one that today registers in caricatures of the predicament of the two Koreas. This course will explore the entangled histories of empire in the Korean War. It will seek to shift our understanding of Korean War from a U.S. dominated Cold War perspective to the Inter Asian contexts in which war unfolded. Further, it will examine closely how scholars in Korea and diasporic scholars have engaged an ongoing war and partition and moved beyond ethnonationalist frameworks. As a study of war, we will consider how techniques of punishment and torture came to be justified and refined in specific sites, the role of the Korean War within multiple other wars, such as Vietnam, and in mass atrocity (such as Gwangju Uprising and Massacre) and the figure of the political prisoner and the subject of humanitarianism.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL

This is an introductory course for those interseted in gaining basic knowledge about contemporary Iran. The focus will be on culture and religion and the ways they in which they become interwoven into different kinds of political stakes.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL, INST-CP

Tom Jobim, best known as the composer of the bossa nova classic “Girl from Ipanema,” once quipped, “Brazil is not for beginners.” Beyond enduring stereotypes, the complexities and contradictions of Brazilian society have long been fertile ground for anthropological inquiry. This seminar offers close readings of classic and contemporary ethnography that interrogate Brazilian society as a set of questions and paradoxes.  We will also explore, conversely, how studies in Brazil have deeply shaped core anthropological thought.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): INST-CP

This course aims to teach basic fieldwork skills: Choosing and entering a community; establishing contacts; learning to listen and to ask questions and locating archival material that might be relevant. It is a hands-on course that increases student familiarity with various neighborhoods such as the Arts District in Baltimore. Recommended Course Background: two or more prior courses in anthropology (not cross-listed courses). Course is a requirement for anthropology major.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: MacLochlainn, Scott
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

You will learn about the efforts of ordinary, non-elite Muslims to shape the relation between their communities and the state as well as to (where applicable) the non-Muslim majority through collective organizing over the last forty years. We will read and discuss books by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists studying Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Henning, Stefan
• Room: Mergenthaler 266
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): CES-ELECT, INST-CP, ISLM-ISLMST

The knowledge and practices of science and medicine are not as self-evident as they may appear. When we observe, what do we see? What counts as evidence? How does evidence become fact? How do facts circulate and what are their effects? Who is included in and excluded from our common-sense notions of science, medicine, and technology? This course will introduce students to central theoretical concerns in Science and Technology Studies and the Medical Humanities, focusing on enduring problematics that animate scholars. In conjunction with examinations of theoretical bases, students will learn to evaluate the methodological tools used in different fields in the humanities to study the production and circulation of scientific knowledge and the structures of medical care and public health. This problem-centered approach will help students understand and apply key concepts and approaches in critical studies of science, technology, and medicine.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Robbins, Gabrielle Lydia Marie
• Room: Gilman 300
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/18
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, CES-TI

Given that we inhabit a world after European colonialism, some would argue that empires are an artifact of the past. Yet, imperialism continues to shape our contemporary multipolar world. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will explore topics ranging from transnational anti-colonial worldmaking projects to (post)colonial infrastructures, to the politics of citizenship and race, contested border regimes, and the rise of far-right movements to focus on the modalities of (im)mobility, subject formation, and how difference and belonging within these often-fraught imperial settings have been both defined and defied. We will also attend to non-European imperial varieties and decenter a Eurocentric perspective on migration and empire. SPECIAL NOTE: There will be a $30 lab fee for the course.

• Days/Times: W 5:30PM - 8:00PM
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room: 555 Penn 448
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 0/5
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL, CES-PD, CES-RI

This interdisciplinary course will introduce students to key issues in Trans Studies. Topics may include: contemporary trans politics, trans medicalization, indigenous and non-Western forms of gender variance, US trans history across class and race, and trans global governance. We will focus on how institutions, such as policing and medicine, and world-historical forces, such as capitalism, colonialism, and Atlantic slavery, have shaped trans history and politics.

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Amin, Kadji
• Room: Bloomberg 276
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM